friendly reminder to you: you won't be in the future either. because all humans have short lifespans. having children won't change that. enjoy the ride, whatever that means to you
Because I'm very used to well poisoners and their lies. As in this case, the liars can't offer any corroborating evidence and implicitly demands that you should disprove their lies. Which of course is impossible. Eventually, the lies become so entrenched because they aren't questioned that people like you become shocked when others disbelieve them.
you say gaining new information from out of body experiences are a fact. what's your evidence to back it up?
I treat those kinds of stories the same way I'd treat an alien abduction or bigfoot story. humans are unreliable narrators. have there been any successful reproducible experiments on it?
No, there were no scientific experiments to prove it. However, in absence of concrete proofs of either theory, both are equally probable to be true. The theory that consciousness arises from brain activity alone is just an assumption based on other research. It has never been properly proven or disproven either.
I'm pretty open minded about this stuff, but I recall reading Robert Monroe (author of several books) tried to prove to himself his OBEs were real by having his wife place an object in a box downstairs without his knowledge and trying to find out what it was.
IIRC he said he invariably got sidetracked between leaving his body and going downstairs, or would be attacked by entities of some kind. He suggested perhaps some kind of subconscious resistance to the experiment.
He listed several times where he claimed to have gained knowledge without trying to while OBE but I wasn't entirely convinced by any of them, so who knows.
The fact he claims to have had hundreds of OBEs and couldn't conclusively prove he could gain knowledge makes me sceptical that he wasn't just in a replica of reality generated by his mind. Anyway, they sound fun/scary/ real to the experiencer.
Well, it is not "brain activity alone", there are always light waves, forces, chemicals, and a lot of other things, acting on the brain from "outside" of the body, through some very strange receptor routs, but the "information" somehow travels. And we know 100% that for a lot of receptors, the firing rates depend on the intensity of the stimulus. So, we can see a direct correlation between, say, an applied force and golgi tendon organ firing. And at the same time, we discovered some types of radiation that we cannot see, and yet they can influence distant objects. I think that is pretty weird. So, we found a lot of direct correlations between brain activity and the outside world. Is there some need for an additional invisible field, not covered in current physics?
But the shredding and reprinting machine is a human body, biological in nature. That isn’t equivalent to a digital “body” made of software. There is a difference between the body-self of yesterday’s cells and a self made of software.
Again I’m not denying that elaborate imitations of the human brain won’t be possible. But that these won’t be copies, they’ll be a new thing. Hence “uploading” is an incorrect model.
> There is a difference between the body-self of yesterday’s cells and a self made of software.
There doesn't seem to be a strong reason to presume this. What is your basis for stating this?
> But that these won’t be copies, they’ll be a new thing. Hence “uploading” is an incorrect model.
Sure, that's a relevant, but pedantic point. Does it matter? Presume star-trek transporters were real, effectively they could be said to be duplicating and murdering every-time someone is beamed up. But the subjective experience is still one of continuity. It seams likely that would be the case for an "uploaded duplicate" they would "feel" like the original, in mind (barring sensory differences). Whether the "upload" process itself is destructive is another matter.
I'm curious how this plays out in reality. Already you can make very crude copies/imitation of people like the Robot Dad mentioned on HN yesterday https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38433330
As time goes on these kind of things will get better and maybe you can have a copy version of you to chat to people you don't really want to talk to or do chores or the like.
As you get older and maybe go gaga the AI version of you may be closer to the old you than your physical self, and that could live on if you pass away.
Not sure if they'd do things while no one talked to them or just respond like GPT or have some physical presence or in VR or if you could leave money and power to the virtual you or not. Guess we'll have to see how that plays out.
Getting data from scanning a brain is probably a long way off but could be added in in a few decades if they get there. Sadly real world teleporters probably aren't happening. Though maybe in VR.
I think that very much depends on how you define "computer". the brain is doing computations, so I think it's safe to think of it as a computer. it's just a completely alien computer to what we build ourselves
By computation, do you mean problem solving? The most simplistic model I have of the brain (not a psychologist, just from thing I read) is that the brain is an advanced pattern matcher. I don't think we even do linear "computation", just because of the quantity of data we are ingesting, storing and retrieving.
how would you do pattern matching without computations?
I think anything that could be described through logic gates or turning machines would be a "computation". And any object or organ that processes information would be a "computer "
Because things are just are. An analogy I can come with is a graph like irrigation canals. You fill them with water and they just are. Or something like an adder circuits. You "input" the numbers and the result is just there. There isn't an algorithmic process with loops, conditions and recursions. We don't store information, we store its patterns and link it to other patterns. We don't process information as much as we filter it through patterns we've stored. Like logic gates do not process electricity, our brain do not process information.
I'm not seeing the distinction. All computation "just is". computation happens through the physical world. adder circuits are performing a computation. an x86 CPU is nothing but a bunch of dumb circuits. water canals can do computations just like electrical circuits. as can biological neurons.
This is a computer with all the abstractions stripped away [1]. It's hard to see the loops and conditionals from the falling marbles, but it is processing information. And electrical computers are essentially the same thing, just scaled up to an unimaginable degree
Read the comments on that link for a summary of my thoughts.
> But neither the song nor the poem has been ‘stored’ in it. The brain has simply changed in an orderly way that now allows us to sing the song or recite the poem under certain conditions
there are a lot of mysteries around the brain, but at a high level, I think you'd have a hard time finding a neuroscientist who doesn't believe the brain processes information. what's the alternative?
Like I said, it depends very much on how you define computer. To me "processing information" == "computation". And a physical system that performs "computations" is a computer. Therefore, a brain is just one type of biological computer.
In a computer science class, the first thing they should teach is that the word "computer" in the course name is abstract, and not just about the metal slab on your desk. There are fundamental laws that apply to all information processing systems, whether electrical, mechanical, or biological. So it makes sense to put them in the same category at times.
But obviously words mean different things in different contexts, and "computer" might mean something entirely different to a neuroscientist than a computer scientist. But I don't think a neuroscientist would disagree that a brain is a computer using the loose definition I described above
Of course, you can set up a definition space so that a puppy is a steam engine.
But if we stick to commonly adopted definitions, like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer or "turing machine" ones - then NO, sorry, brain and computer has barely anything in common. Besides being made of atoms and being complex )
So it sounds like we both agree the brain is at least a physical object that performs computations. I'm surprised you don't see similarities with other physical systems that perform computations, but sounds like a terminology difference
Brain doesn’t perform computations in any CS accepted sense (neither it is a turing machine nor it has any encoded program to execute any defined algorithm).
It processes information, yes. But anything more specific than that is full of unknowns, unconfirmed hypothesis and speculations.
Would you call an ants colony a computer? A tree? A government? But they all obviously processes information and seemingly perform computations, don’t they?
> Brain doesn’t perform computations in any CS accepted sense (neither it is a turing machine nor it has any encoded program to execute any defined algorithm).
That's a big statement. Anything that can be effectively described with math, can be described using Turing machines and algorithms. Any Turing-complete system is equivalent. As far as we know, all of physics can be described by equations, therefore is (theoretically) computable. What makes you think brains are special? Are there any other physical systems that you think are uncomputable?
The only arguments I've found for why the brain can't be described by algorithms go into unconvincing pseudo-scientific arguments about the magic of quantum mechanics, which I find very unconvincing (quantum algorithms are still algorithms, and describable through math after all). Do you have a better one?
> Would you call an ants colony a computer? A tree? A government? But they all obviously processes information and seemingly perform computations, don’t they?
Some of your other examples are more complicated, but all of them can be described through the computational lens, and modeled as Turing machines. you will find many scientific papers filled with equations trying to describe the algorithms behind each of them
Because calling it a computer means you can apply computer science concepts to it. That's the interesting part. You can talk about the classes of algorithms the brain uses to solve difficult problems, the ways it tries to conserve energy, the architecture trade offs, how to model it with math, etc. That stuff is non-obvious if you treat it like a magic black box. It's not a meaningless insight
Can the brain solve NP problems in polynomial time? The brain itself is a mystery, but we know some things about computation, so it's pretty safe to say no, it cannot.
Maybe on HN it's consensus that all living things are computers in this way, but plenty of people think the brain is literally supernatural. By saying "the brain nothing in common with a computer. We don't know what it's doing", those people will be nodding their heads. But we do know some things about computation, so we can apply those insights to the brain
> You can talk about the classes of algorithms the brain uses to solve difficult problems
> But we do know some things about computation, so we can apply those insights to the brain
You can.
But it is a snake oil, it doesn't give you any actual insight on how brain really works.
To be able to model something with computer doesn't mean it is like a computer.
But at the same time such thinking can really confuse unprepared mind that brain is really modeled by nature as some sort of sophisticated turing machine.
At the same time, pretending that brains don't obey the laws of computation has its own implications, which can confuse unprepared minds into thinking:
1) That brains are something supernatural, instead of physical information processing systems that can be analyzed and understood as such.
2) That digital turing-complete computers are limited and can't possibly do the kinds of complex processing that biological computers can do
Which is also misleading
A brain is not a Turing machine, but a Turing machine can be a brain. Biological brains are just a subset in the space of all possible computers
But I don't think either of us is confused, so this is just a conversation about the semantics, which I'm not very interested in
I believe there were periods where epistemology was not broadly equated with pedantry as is the case today when one points out epistemic issues in consensus (aka: "the") reality.
